Nearly ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, the United States suffered the worst terror attack in our history, as terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and used them to attack several targets, including the World Trade Center in New York City. Since that day, the primary suspected mastermind of those attacks, al Qaeda‘s Osama Bin Laden, had been at large. Despite promises by former President George W. Bush to capture or kill this terrorist leader, Bin Laden successfully evaded the United States and its allies. Last night, during a well-executed covert operation, the United States killed Bin Laden in a mansion he was housed in located right outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The death of the terrorist leader marks the end of a decade-long search for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, it should serve as a bookend to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were launched at least partly with the stated goal of rooting out Bin Laden and his al Qaeda allies. With the proper leadership, Bin Laden’s death could mark the end of an era where the threat of terrorism was viewed anachronistically as the all-consuming threat used to justify unnecessary conflict and the degradation of civil liberties.
A LONG SEARCH: Although Bin Laden gained most of his notoriety from the 9/11 attacks, he actually had been sought even before those events for his role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and the first attack on the World Trade Center. Following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush failed to capture him in Afghanistan — as even his administration conceded that they failed to capture Bin Laden at the battle of Tora Bora — and later started a war in Iraq that mis-directed U.S. resources to an unnecessary and disastrous war. Just six months after 9/11, Bush was already telling people that he “doesn’t spend that much time” on seeking Bin Laden. The Weekly’s Standard’s Fred Barnes reported in 2006 that the president told him “Bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.” Yet yesterday a number of major conservatives gave Bush praise anyway. Former Bush advisor Karl Rove said that “the tools that President Bush put into place — GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information — obviously served his successor quite well.” Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner wrote that “Bin Laden’s elimination vindicates U.S. strategy in the region, started under President George W. Bush.” On September 10, 2010, President Obama told a reporter at a news conference that “capturing or killing bin Laden and Zawahiri would be extremely important to our national security.”
HIDING IN A MANSION: While many expected the terrorist leader to be hiding out in a cave in Afghanistan or in the northwest provinces of Pakistan, U.S. forces and intelligence assets actually found Bin Laden to be residing in a mansion compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, which is located approximately 75 miles from the capital city of Islamabad. The United States had been scoping out the location since 2010, and on April 29, it used a special operations team as a part of a “kill mission” that resulted in the death of the al Qaeda leader, his brother, one of his sons, and perhaps an unidentified woman. President Obama announced the news of Bin Laden’s killing at a press conference on Sunday night, saying, “The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.” The fact that Bin Laden was hiding so close to the Pakistani capital and a short drive from Pakistani military headquarters has raised eyebrows among many, with some analysts wondering how the terrorist could’ve avoided the eyes of the Pakistani intelligence services. White House counterterror adviser John Brennan said during a news conference yesterday that we shouldn’t forget that “Pakistan has been responsible for capturing and killing more terrorists inside of Pakistan than any country and it’s by a wide margin and there have been many, many brave Pakistani soldiers, security officials, as well as citizens who have given their lives because of the terrorism scourge in that country.” Soon after the death of the terrorist leader’s killing was reported, a bomb exploded at a mosque in northwestern Pakistan, killing a woman and three kids, perhaps the first retaliation from terrorists. The news of Bin Laden’s death served to bring closure to many Americans, with a large group of people converging outside the White House to sing the National Anthem, massive cheering taking place at the Mets-Phillys game, and Arab and Muslim Americans celebrating in Dearborn, Michigan. The reaction among many 9/11 survivors was also recorded in the media. “If this means there is one less death in the future, then I’m glad for that,” said Harry Waizer, who suffered third-degree burns while escaping from one of the Twin Towers. “But I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama Bin Laden.”
TORTURED CONCLUSIONS: Shortly after the death of Bin Laden, many right-wing commentators began crediting torture for the intelligence that led to finding the terrorist leader. Bush torture program architect John Yoo said that Bin Laden’s death was “yet another sign of the success of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies” and that the Al Qaeda courier who gave the intelligence was subjected to “enhanced interrogation methods.” Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen also said that the intelligence came from the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.” The National Review’s Dan Foster wrote that “it’s clear that we couldn’t have had this outcome without Bush-era counter-terror policies…Obama was wrong about the usefulness of…the interrogation methods they pursued.” Yet yesterday, in an interview with Newsmax, Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that the courier was not subjected to waterboarding or other torture methods. Additionally, the Associated Press reports that Al Qaeda “number three” Khalid Sheik Mohammed “did not reveal” information that led to Bin Laden’s location “while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said.” He identified them many months later under standard interrogation.”
A BOOKEND TO THE WARS: Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan along with a larger international coalition, seeking to uproot Al Qaeda and capture or kill Bin Laden. With Bin Laden’s death, the U.S. has now achieved one of its major war aim, and the killing of the terrorist leader should serve as a symbolic bookend to the conflict, smoothing the way for the U.S. and international community to draw down their forces from both Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda did have a major presence, and Iraq, where they did not. In fact, the Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan has slowly dwindled to where the group has almost no active fighters in the country. As Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) said during a conference call with bloggers last year, “I think about how much we spend, a billion dollars per year per Al-Qaeda member to defeat them. It’s not making ourselves safer.” And the irony that Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, an ally with whom the United States cooperates with on military and intelligence operations, and not in Afghanistan, where it has well over a hundred thousand troops, was not lost on Afghan leadership. “Osama was not in Afghanistan: they found him in Pakistan,” said Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “The war on terror is not in Afghan villages…but in the safe havens of terrorism outside Afghanistan.” As Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) told ThinkProgress in an interview yesterday, “We went there to get Osama bin Laden. And we have now gotten Osama bin laden … So yes, I think this does strengthen the case [for withdrawal].” Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT), Rep. Jarold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) echoed similar sentiments. Last night, 9/11 responder Kenny Specht told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he hopes Bin Laden’s death could finally signal a coming peace after ten years of nonstop war: “I mean, we’re in a quagmire, for lack of a better term, in Afghanistan. I hope to God that tonight is one large step to maybe wrapping up operations in Afghanistan.”
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